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Apache Deltacloud adds EC2 and reaches 1.0 milestone

The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) has announced that the Apache Deltacloud project, which aims to increase the interoperability of various IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) clouds, has reached a sufficient level of maturity to warrant the release of version 1.0 of the software. Deltacloud 1.0 also offers a frontend which presents Amazon's EC2 API to client applications.

The new EC2 API gives developers a way to take applications that were written specifically to the EC2 API and run them on all the IaaS clouds that Deltacloud supports. "Deltacloud makes it possible for clients to use the EC2 API against a VMWare vSphere installation or against OpenStack" said David Lutterkort, Vice President of Apache Deltacloud, adding "It goes a long way towards avoiding lock-in on the cloud API level".

Deltacloud is a server process that offers several different client APIs with the goal of making web applications independent from the IaaS cloud they run on. Deltacloud translates the calls coming in over these APIs to the calls expected by the different cloud services. This translation is done by making use of a range of different drivers.

The Deltacloud project's own REST-based API is the native API for the system and offers an independent reference API. That API was previously supplemented by a client interface for the Cloud Infrastructure Management Interface standard currently under development by the Distributed Management Task Force. Deltacloud also provides developers with resources to write their own interfaces to the service, allowing custom in-house applications to be deployed on different cloud services.

The project was originally started by Red Hat with the goal of enabling users to access different cloud infrastructures in a uniform way – it has been a top-level project of the ASF since October 2011. Deltacloud 1.0, which was actually released on 15 June, is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License and can be downloaded from the project's web site. Detailed installation instructions and release notes are also available.